Introduction to Ruth

Title and authorship

The book is named for a Moabite woman, and it is the only book of Scripture named for a foreigner. Its author is nowhere identified and never hints at himself.

One internal marker is worth noticing. The narrator pauses at Ruth 4:7 to explain the sandal custom as something done in former time in Israel — an explanation only needed by readers for whom the practice had lapsed. So the book was written at some distance from the events it reports.

The closing genealogy ends at David Ruth 4:22 and goes no further, which sets a lower bound: written after David was somebody worth ending a genealogy on. Beyond that Scripture is silent, and the story does not depend on knowing.

Date

Two datings are in question and should be kept apart. The events are placed in the first sentence: in the days when the judges judged Ruth 1:1, the period Scripture describes as everyone doing what was right in his own eyes Judges 21:25.

The writing is later. The sandal explanation of Ruth 4:7 assumes a custom gone out of use, and the genealogy runs to David. A date in or after his reign fits both. Nothing narrows it further, and nothing in the book turns on it.

Backgrounds

Three laws stand behind the plot, and the story is barely intelligible without them.

Gleaning. A harvester was forbidden to reap the field's corners or go back for what was dropped; it belonged to the poor and the foreigner Leviticus 19:9–10 Deuteronomy 24:19–21. Ruth's work in chapter 2 is a legal right being exercised, not charity being received — which is why she asks nobody's permission to begin.

Levirate marriage. When a man died childless his brother was to marry the widow and raise up the dead man's name; refusal was marked publicly by removing the man's sandal Deuteronomy 25:5–10. Chapter 4 is that ceremony, conducted at the gate.

Redemption of land. A kinsman could buy back property sold out of the family Leviticus 25:25. The word for that relative is goel, and it runs ten times through this short book.

The setting is a famine that drove a Bethlehem  family into Moab  — the irony sitting in the town's own name, which means house of bread.

Theology and purpose

The book's word is hesed — covenant loyalty, kindness that goes past obligation — and it occurs exactly three times, once in each relationship the story cares about. Naomi prays it over her daughters-in-law Ruth 1:8; Naomi credits it to God working through Boaz Ruth 2:20; Boaz names it in Ruth herself Ruth 3:10. God's hesed, a man's, a foreigner's — the same word for all three, and the book never separates the divine act from the human ones that carry it.

That is how providence works here. God is named constantly in blessings and prayers but acts only twice in the narrator's own voice: he gives bread Ruth 1:6 and he gives conception Ruth 4:13. Everything between is people behaving decently, and the book treats that as the same story.

Naomi frames the question herself. She went out full and came home empty Ruth 1:21, and she blames God for it plainly. The book answers her without ever arguing with her — Boaz sends her grain with the words don't go empty Ruth 3:17, the same word she used, and by the end the women tell her she has a restorer of life and a daughter-in-law better than seven sons Ruth 4:15.

And the last four verses widen past the family entirely. The Moabitess is David's great-grandmother, and the New Testament keeps her there in the line that runs to Christ Matthew 1:5.

Additional notes

Note — a Moabite in the assembly. The law says an Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter Yahweh's assembly, even to the tenth generation Deuteronomy 23:3. Ruth is called the Moabitess five times, and her great-grandson is David. Readers reasonably ask how the book and the law stand together, and Scripture supplies the materials for an answer.

First, the law states its own reason, and it is conduct rather than blood: because they did not meet Israel with bread and water, and because they hired Balaam Deuteronomy 23:4. It is a charge against what a nation did, not a statement about what its members are.

Second, Ruth's own words renounce exactly that standing. Your people will be my people, and your God my God Ruth 1:16 — spoken after Naomi points out that Orpah has gone back to her people and to her god Ruth 1:15. Ruth is not a Moabite who slipped past a rule; she is a Moabite who stopped being one in the only sense the law was about.

Third, Scripture states the principle directly elsewhere: the foreigner who has joined himself to Yahweh is not to say that Yahweh will separate him from his people Isaiah 56:3.

On the ten names. The closing genealogy runs Perez to David in exactly ten generations Ruth 4:18–22. Ten-member genealogies are a known biblical shape, used twice in Genesis Genesis 5:3–32 Genesis 11:10–26, so the count may be structural. That it lands David on the tenth, in a book about a Moabite, is at least striking. Whether the arrangement is deliberate the text does not say; striking is as far as the evidence goes.

Outline

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